Book Image

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

By : Ian Wild, Jaswant Tak
Book Image

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

By: Ian Wild, Jaswant Tak

Overview of this book

The new and revamped Moodle is the top choice for developers to create cutting edge e-learning apps that cater to different user’s segments and are visually appealing as well. This book explains how the Moodle 3.x platform provides a framework that allows developers to create a customized e-learning solution. It begins with an exploration of the different types of plugin.. We then continue with an investigation of creating new courses. You will create a custom plugin that pulls in resources from a third-party repository. Then you’ll learn how users can be assigned to courses and granted the necessary permissions. Furthermore, you will develop a custom user home. At the end of the book, we’ll discuss the Web Services API to fully automate Moodle 3.x in real time.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
6
Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds

Managing courses


Moodle courses are where learning takes place, and in order to ensure Moodle is as flexible a learning tool as possible, the Moodle platform has been designed to allow developers to provide as much course design flexibility as possible through the plugin system. We start this section by investigating how plugins might be used to alter the standard Moodle course layout.

Course layout

Moodle comes supplied with four standard course layouts:

  • Weekly
  • Topics
  • Social
  • Single activity

The course format is specified from the Course format page:

For example, setting a course to a Topics format containing five sections will configure a course to display three columns: a central column where teaching interactions can be added, with two columns to the left and right that contain blocks of supporting content.

The code for these four formats is to be found under \course\format, as in the following screenshot taken from Eclipse:

Any new course format we create will need to be included in this folder...